+ Sponsors

Thursday, 28 January 2016

You Say Po-TAH-to, I say Po-TAY-to

The news of the million-dollar spud photo just depresses me. Not for the reason you'd think; only because it makes my job redundant. I'm supposed to provide entertainment. How can I possibly make fun of that? It's like trying to make fun of the parlous state of American politics by pretending that some fatheaded bag of hot ego is in the running for President because he played a billionaire on TV. It's readymade self-parody. Nothing to add needed. I might as well go stand in line for unemployment. If Christopher Reeve were still alive, maybe people would vote for him for president because he's secretly really Superman.

I've been trying to research this for three days to find out if it's real. A collector pays $1.08 million (or some sum near to that) for a photograph of...a potato.

Appears to be the case.

All right then. What's wrong with a potato? Edward Weston took a very famous picture of a pepper, didn't he? And one of Paul Caponigro's great masterpieces is a photograph of an apple (which you can buy in the ideal 8x10 size for the spectacular bargain price—comparatively speaking—of $6,000). So why not a potato? Seems plausible in principle.

The cynic in me has a different notion. Imaginary scenario: a high-end portrait photographer adept at marketing to rich people sees a photographer claim to sell a nondescript photograph for $6 million, and notices that, in the process, said photographer gets priceless publicity—hundreds of millions of dollars' worth—all over the globe. Most of it negative, but still. So he contrives (somehow) to get a sympathetic supporter to replicate a subtly more plausible version of the same scenario. He then reaps free publicity all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of people who didn't know his name yesterday will know his name tomorrow. Genius. Ninja-level marketing move.

That can't be it, right? I'm just being cynical? A super-clever marketer adept at extracting hundreds of thousands of [insert name of currency] from the wallets of clients would probably have noticed the media's knee-jerk weakness and insatiable appetite for fake-outrageous stories to put up as click-bait. But to exploit that? I don't know where I come up with such zany ideas. I must have a suspicious mind.

And then some people will want me to post the photograph (no), repeat the guy's name (no), or provide a link to the story (no).

There are days when I just want to pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep.

Mike(Thanks to Coco at Jackson Fine Art for the pricing information about "Apple, NYC, 1964" by Paul Caponigro)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Mike adds: In case Mark's joke is too subtle even for TOP readers, autochromes, an early color process developed by the Lumière brothers in France, were made using potato starch.

Edo: "Small potatoes that is not. Somebody had to say it."

Bri: "Oh dear! As an fellow Irishman, I'm always having to listen to jokes about potatoes. Who's having the last laugh now!"

Gordon Cahill (partial comment): "Jealous much, people? Photographer photographs potato and puts print on wall. Rich person he knows sees print and offers a million for the print. Photographer decides to not look gift potato in the mouth. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, isn't it. Personally I'd love to have a potato shot I could sell for seven figures. I wonder if I can get $500k for that carrot shot I have."

Kosch: "I own seven prints of single vegetables and fruits that I have hanging around my house. I have paid decent money for each print. Of everything having on my walls, they are the ones I stare at the most. I derive pleasure from having vegetable and fruit prints on my walls. Thank goodness that art is subjective, and thank goodness some people have disposable income at varying levels. It keeps quite a few of us in lenses."

Mike replies: Maybe you could make Gordon an offer for his carrot shot.

Bill Tyler: "After seeing the potato photograph, I was inspired to make the greatest art non-work of my life. Inspired by John Cage's composition, 4'33", and informed by the sublime poetry of Bunbury, it is a non-photograph of a non-potato. Unmade on highly archival empty space, with no pigments, precious metals, or substrate, in an edition so limited that there are no actual instances, it is a masterpiece for the ages. The price? A mere quadrillion quatloos, payable in easy monthly installments."

The artist Alex Minewski supposedly (I have this second hand from people who knew him) gave up painting "society portraits" and began painting portraits of fish heads "because you don't have to talk with them."

Relative to the Fine Art market, if you are inclined to "pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep", my question would be, "what's taken you so long?" - the art market has been operating at borderline insanity levels, price-wise, for decades.

In any event, what's not to like about a picture, as the photographer states, in which a potato is used (start rolling your eyes here) "as a proxy for the ontological study of human experience ... I see commonalities between humans and potatoes that speak to our relationship as individuals within a collective species ... Generally, the life of the harvested potato is violent and taken for granted."

Whatever. The whole deal just goes to prove 2 time proven maxims ....

A fool and his money are soon parted ~ early pre-15the century proverb, and

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people ~ H.L. Mencken

[I don't actually think the art world is to blame for this one...to appearances, this is just a very savvy marketer doing his thing among the supporters he's generated for himself. Although the art market still has to answer for Richard Prince. --Mike]

Mike, that's just pretty much all of current art in a nutshell. Visit any museum of contemporary art (e.g., MOCA or the Broad in L.A.). By and large, there no "there" there. There is, however, a lot of curator delusion that the emperor is wearing clothes.

"I see commonalities between humans and potatoes that speak to our relationship as individuals within a collective species. Generally, the life of a harvested potato is violent and taken for granted. I use the potato as a proxy for the ontological study of the human experience."

Puh-leez. It's just a freakin' potato.

I've got some organic blue ones in my basement. Maybe this is a trend to jump on, get rich while the getting is good?

What bothers me about the potato photo is that there is no mystery in the presentation. Perhaps if it was in black and white.... or in an unusual shadow. Or perhaps if it symbolized something beyond the waste of perception and money.

Yes, I agree, it is much like the presidential race.

Hard to take such things seriously, and yet it does influence countless people in perceiving art and understanding our democratic process, and perhaps one's own self. Who knows? Certainly not me.

Mike, you are so good at this writing game. Lines like the one below have me coming back every day. Thanks for making the insane funny; we need all the help we can get!

Quoting the article:
It's like trying to make fun of the parlous state of American politics by pretending that some fatheaded bag of hot ego is in the running for President because he played a billionaire on TV. It's readymade self-parody. Nothing to add needed.

as this conversation is sure to come with each selling photograph in the $1M+, and how these days the cases l'internets fame causes even more confusion in a sensible discussion, I found the discourse in this blog entry a good reference to the usual questions of unfairness/wtf that typically come up (elsewhere): [ http://davidduchemin.com/2016/01/whats-your-potato/ ]

That picture made quite a furore on the internet, but I just shrugged. When I saw it, the only thing that occurred to me was: "Wow, that's sharp! And how the hell did he get that inky black background?" I don't know what that says about me, but I really didn't care about anything else. I've seen it all: people paying fortunes for all sorts of absurd things is quite commonplace. It doesn't shock me anymore.
As you point out, Edward Weston made a picture of a pepper. Actually, he made several pictures of peppers, as well as of a cabbage leaf, an egg slicer, an eggplant, a bedpan and a toilet. Except that he was exploring pure forms with artistic purposes. Our potato photographer was just seeking more attention (kudos for not mentioning his name and [or] showing the picture). He was following the old motto: what's important is to be talked about, badly or otherwise. Anything goes when it comes to drawing attention.

...On the other hand, legumography might just be where it's at. Just watch me as I rise to fame and become a millionaire by taking a picture of a cucumber. All I need is a buyer.

I looked up the photographer in question, and found out he is "acclaimed". OK. I did an image search on his name; he seems to specialize in full front facial portraits against a black background, lit slightly from the side and above, just like the potato portrait. So, he's consistent in his style. Also Irish; perhaps he had an opening in his schedule and grabbed the nearest spud?

That "fatheaded bag of hot ego" is doing exactly what you suspect the potato photographer of doing. He's well aware of the "media's knee-jerk weakness and insatiable appetite for fake-outrageous stories to put up as click-bait," so he insults every ethic group, every foreign country, just about every demographic, and then he reaps billions of dollars worth of advertising, without having to resort to his own billions (cough) to pay for it.

I have mentioned a couple of times to my co-art-market-stand-holder Richard that we should try displaying just a single, small, framed print on our market stand some time with a price tag of £1,000 (about fifty times our usual) and see what happens.
Anthony

To be honest the photograph by the Irishman Kevin Abosch is not all that bad. It’s an overpriced, but not tasteless potato .
That can’t be said about the work of Peter Lik, the number 1 bestseller of all times. Andreas Gursky and Cindy Sherman are the top of the serious art world. But how about runner up at number 11, Dmitry Medvedev “Tobolsk Kremlin” that he shot from the plane?

I kinda like the potato photo. I don't $1,000,000 like it, but it's nice. The artist's statement is a real letdown though. There is so much history and human experience that has been reliant on the simple potato. Crop failures have driven mass migrations and changed societies; you could write volumes on the history and significance of the potato. But no, the potato's "violent and taken for granted" life is simply a vague proxy for "the ontological study of human experience." Which human experiences? It reads like it was randomly generated to make grammatical sense without actually saying anything. I'm disappointed.

Yes . . .. But, look again, and notice the subtle use of a single light source, and the abrupt shadowing of the lower half of the potato into that exquisite black. After all, what is the price of perfection?

Since these sorts of posts generate wonderful off-topic (OT) comment threads ... is there an Autochrome plug-in for PS or other digital processing software?

I actually love Autochromes. (When is the next GEM exhibit with autochromes on display?) Or will GEM have a large format autochrome workshop? They already have a workshop for dry plate emulsion, coating and shooting. Mark Osterman, can you help? :)

A true artist would have sliced that photo into strips and deep fried them. The resultant masterpiece would have been titled "French Fries" (or "Freedom Fries," depending on your political viewpoint) and probably sold for two or three times the price.

I know what you mean. It's not easy taking the news seriously, is it? I don't watch daily news. I subscribe to a weekly newsmagazine (Macleans) in the hopes that a one-week delay will filter out the worst of the nonsense.

But I read an article in Macleans this week about that guy with the hair who claims to be a billionaire deal-maker, and they quoted a supporter of his saying that the man with the hair understands what life is like for guys like him. What?

The amount of money proported to have been paid for this photograph rivals IMO the amount of taxpayers money paid by the National Gallery in Ottawa Ontario Canada some years ago for a painting consisting of three different coloured stripes, on a huge canvas.

Outrage then, now no longer an issue.

As with so many events we the reader shall soon move on to greater and lesser things to occupy our time.

Photographer photographs potato and puts print on wall. Rich person he knows sees print and offers a million for the print. Photographer decides to not look gift potato in the mouth. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, isn't it. Personally I'd love to have a potato shot I could sell for seven figures. I wonder if I can get $500K for that carrot shot I have.

Gordon

p.s. People would vote for Christopher Reeve because he was a decent and honest human being who brought joy to millions without having to be a deuche. He would have won in a landslide. And my 11 yr old who didn't even know him while he was alive knows he is the real superman.

"I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid." Kurt Vonnegut in "The Breakfast of Champions"

But on the other hand - why not? There are people in the world for whom $1m is not a sum of money of any relevance. Perhaps the purchaser would have spent that money as I spend £10, on a whim with no real thought of value, or perhaps he simply wished to show patronage to a favoured artist. He may even have meant it ironically; a surprising percentage of billionaires are quite intelligent.

And yet, as I'm sure many here feel, it seems like such a waste. It would have been nice to see that money spent on photography - an endowment perhaps - rather than a photograph.

Haven't tried shooting vegs yet, may before the end comes. In the last ten years I finally started showing my work, got into a number of National Juried shows, and have come to the rather obvious conclusion that: People from an art school background have a different idea of a good image; and some people have to have something that nobody else has done, especially if it is bizarre.

Hmmm, Back in around 1972 or so I shot a B&W image of a eggplant that strangely grew a nose that looked like then President Nixon. The eggplant looked a lot like Nixon, the nose was right where it should be, it had his cheeks and on. Seems like I should find that negative given today's market, who knows, maybe that's retirement money?

I would need proof that these photographers really were paid these prices.
They are not in the art world. Particularly the one with the ridiculous HDR postcard pictures may be good for photo competitions, but never for the art market. I think it's publicity stands. You can buy Herb Ritts prints for a few thousand Euros. The more expensive ones cost 23000.